Final Day at The Bath and West

Clang! Clang! Clang! The smell of burning hair is getting stronger and stronger. Clang! Clang! Clang! Sparks fly and fires roar. Big men hammer red hot irons rods into the shape of horseshoes. I am watching farriers work as they have for at least two thousand years.
Sights like this are what I have enjoyed most about the Bath and West. On your left a giant Shire horse pulls a huge log, on your right sits a simulator transporting you into Jenson Button’s car flying through a chicane. Two millennia of culture, ten feet apart.
The Bath and West keeps people, and most importantly children, excited with new and amazing things but shows them ancient ways of life at the same time. Important things that should never be forgotten. This is no bucolic idyll; this is not the re-enactment of an outdated pastoral scene. These ways of life have stood the test of time. To understand the world we live in we must understand the world that came before. Ancient traditions and ways of life allow us all to see how culture has developed, they help us figure out where it might go next.
I was at the farriers’ workshop, next to the BBC Somerset bus, to talk with the lovely Emma Britton on the Morning Show. Chatting about all the things I had done at the show I was reminded how lucky I am to live in Somerset and the South West. A region crammed with many of the best views and food and drink Britain has to offer.
The South West is something to be proud of, something to climb to the rafters and shout about. Here at the Bath and West this is what they are doing. They give a platform to a valuable array of craftsmen and women, food and drink producers and countless other exhibitors. Here, people share their knowledge of the things they make and do.
I grew up here, in Shepton Mallet, but yesterday outside the Dairy Cattle Shed I talked to a couple from Derby. They had been to the show as children and their memories were instrumental in their decision to bring up their children in Somerset.
They wanted them to see and be a part of the things they remembered so fondly from their own childhoods. This is how traditions are maintained, passed on from generation to generation. I look forward to my grandchildren thrilling at the Formula One car of the future Jenson Button and to witnessing the food and agricultural innovations that I am sure will make this great event a source of wonder for countless years to come.